House conservatives have agreed to drop the NCUA’s new Member Business Rules from a list of regulations they want eliminated during the first hundred days of the Trump Administration, Ryan Donovan, CUNA’s chief advocacy officer said Wednesday.
The House Freedom Caucus recently released a list of more than 200 rules and regulations it wants Congress and the incoming administration to tackle.
The business lending rule was included on that list.
Donovan said that the Freedom Caucus had included the lending rules on the list because the rules were issued within the timeframe that allows Congress to revoke regulations at the end of an administration.
The Congressional Review Act enables Congress to void such rules, known as “midnight regulations” because they are issued during the closing days of an administration.
The law has only been used successfully once since its enactment when Department of Labor regulations governing ergonomics in the workplace were overturned.
However, House Republicans have expressed a desire to use the law at the end of the Obama Administration.
Donovan said CUNA and the Carolinas Credit Union League contacted the office of Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) to explain that rather than stifling business, the MBL rules would allow credit unions to expand lending.
Based on that argument, Meadows agreed to drop the rules from the documents.
“There…was no ill intent,” Donovan said.
Meadows’s office did not respond to multiple messages.
Donovan acknowledged that another set of NCUA rules—those expanding credit union fields of membership—also were issued during a timeframe that could subject them to the Congressional Review Act.
He added, however, that he has not heard of any effort to rescind those rules, saying that CUNA was prepared to argue that the regulations help, rather than constrain credit union efforts to provide services.
